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Meaning Meeting - Jéssica Mendes / Modal anaphora

Two young women, their faces showing through holes in a giant cut out of a bean, as if they were two peas in a pod.

Meaning Meeting - Jéssica Mendes / Modal anaphora

Linguistics | Philosophy Tuesday, April 30, 2024 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm Marie Mount Hall, 3416J (Wimbledon)

Tuesday April 30, Jéssica leads the Meaning Meeting, with a discussion of "Modal anaphora in conditionals." Note that the meeting will be upstairs (3416), in Wimbledon.

According to the most widely-accepted theory of conditionals, conditional antecedents serve the purpose of restricting the domain of a quantifier (modal or adverbial) in the consequent. Proponents of this view generally do not place much emphasis on the morphosyntactic makeup of the antecedent (with the exception of those working on counterfactuals). The general goal of this talk is to argue that the tense-aspect-mood of the antecedent plays a more important role in determining which readings are available to conditionals than normally assumed. More locally, I will show that conditionals with a future-oriented if-clause, like those in (1), have a covert modal in their antecedents. 

a. If John goes to the party, Mary will go too. 
b. If John doesn’t go to the conference, Mary has to go.
c. If the lights go on when you arrive home, the electricity has been turned back on.            (Williamson, 2021) 

Adopting a dynamic treatment of conditionals allows us to harness this modality and derive intuitively correct meanings for the sentences in (1) while assuming a more transparent mapping between syntax and semantics.

Add to Calendar 04/30/24 12:30 PM 04/30/24 2:00 PM America/New_York Meaning Meeting - Jéssica Mendes / Modal anaphora

Tuesday April 30, Jéssica leads the Meaning Meeting, with a discussion of "Modal anaphora in conditionals." Note that the meeting will be upstairs (3416), in Wimbledon.

According to the most widely-accepted theory of conditionals, conditional antecedents serve the purpose of restricting the domain of a quantifier (modal or adverbial) in the consequent. Proponents of this view generally do not place much emphasis on the morphosyntactic makeup of the antecedent (with the exception of those working on counterfactuals). The general goal of this talk is to argue that the tense-aspect-mood of the antecedent plays a more important role in determining which readings are available to conditionals than normally assumed. More locally, I will show that conditionals with a future-oriented if-clause, like those in (1), have a covert modal in their antecedents. 

a. If John goes to the party, Mary will go too. 
b. If John doesn’t go to the conference, Mary has to go.
c. If the lights go on when you arrive home, the electricity has been turned back on.            (Williamson, 2021) 

Adopting a dynamic treatment of conditionals allows us to harness this modality and derive intuitively correct meanings for the sentences in (1) while assuming a more transparent mapping between syntax and semantics.

 Marie Mount Hall